Self-taught vegetarian Florentine polymath and artist. Recurrent focus of bizarre conspiracy theories.
It’s an oldie, but a goodie: first published in 1979, Wilfrid Blunt and Sandra Raphael’s “The Illustrated Herbal” (particularly the revised 1994 edition) is a must-buy first read for any Voynich Manuscript would-be herbal decipherer - if only to make plain by how much its herbal pages differ from other contemporary herbals.
Of course, Blunt has [...] Read more »
A few years ago, people Googling for “Voynich” started to see a sponsored “AdWord” link on the right hand side provocatively posing the question of whether there might be some link between the Voynich Manuscript and Leonardo da Vinci, and pointing them to www.edithsherwood.com.
Naturally, I pointed out that this hypothesis was a load of rubbish, primarily because Leonardo was [...] Read more »
Here’s a nice little article showing how science and art history research can work together in a harmonious way: using high-intensity x-rays, a materials scientist and a chemist found an portrait hidden beneath Van Gogh’s “Patch of Grass”.
Incidentally, the webpage is #1 of a set of 7, most of which are a bit poor: but [...] Read more »
Would having “Expert on the Voynich Manuscript” on your CV significantly raise your perceived intellectuality (i.e. an extra ten grand per year on your salary)? It would? Then read on, and I’ll reveal the secret two-stage process that They don’t want you to find out…
Stage One. You start out by pretending to be a Voynich [...] Read more »
My fellow Voynich old-timer Jan Hurych has long been interested in various Prague-linked research strands: after all, Prague was home to the first three properly-documented owners of the Voynich Manuscript (Jacobus de Tepenecz, Georg Baresch, and Johannes Marcus Marci), as well as its most illustrious claimed owner (Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II).
It is certainly true [...] Read more »
It’s not the greatest of art history mysteries, but if you haven’t seen this 4-minute YouTube clip from www.ted.com (an interesting boundary-crossing conference phenomenon you may not have come across) about how Siegfried Woldhek went looking for Leonardo’s face in his notebooks, I think you’ve missed out.
Most modern stories about Leonardo I’d advise taking with [...] Read more »
I’ve often wondered what Lynn Thorndike thought of the Voynich Manuscript: after all, he (his first name came from the town of Lynn, Massachusetts) lived from 1882 to 1965, and continued to publish long after his retirement in 1950, and so was active before, during and after the 1920s when Wilfrid Voynich’s cipher manuscript mania/hype [...] Read more »
(…da Vinci, not di Caprio, in case you think I’ve lost my mind).
Sure, Leonardo was a lovely guy, great technique, cutting edge, a bit flaky - but he was a Quattrocento Florentine, and (if you read Jacob Burckhardt only a little bit too literally) they were pretty much all like that back then. So what [...] Read more »
Why is it that so many people wonder whether Leonardo da Vinci created the Voynich Manuscript? Even well-informed, thoughtful people such as Edith Sherwood (whose Adwords ad frequently pops up if you happen to Google for “Voynich”) manage to succumb to this notion.
There’s only one little problem: the VMs’ pen-strokes predominantly go from top-left to bottom-right, clearly [...] Read more »
I have to admit that I find answering the question “What is the Voynich Manuscript?” really hard. I suspect this is mainly because, in the absence of a ’smoking gun’ proof, there are just about as many ideas of the Voynich Manuscript as there are people looking at it. Demonic, pagan, sexy, cool, meaningless, hoax, [...] Read more »
